Godard: Where and When

Jean-Luc Godard’s new film, “Film Socialisme,” opens today (I wrote a capsule review of it in the magazine and added a few posts about its thematic coherence, its ethnic politics, and its family story) at IFC Center, which is the right place: it’s the New York theatre that is (along with the Sunshine and the small theatre at Anthology Film Archives), for me, most reminiscent of a French movie theatre. Seeing it there in a press screening last week brought to mind the first time I saw a film by Godard, in my freshman year of college—“Breathless” (a cinematic conversion experience which I discussed here last year at the time of its re-release at Film Forum)—as well as viewings of other films by Godard at other times and other places.

“Contempt”: One night in the summer of 1976, after work at a pen factory out on Long Island, a co-worker—a recent college graduate who had a car—drove to the city and took me along to the Elgin Theatre, at 19th and 8th (it’s now the Joyce)—for a screening of “Contempt,” which I had never seen, but which I had heard described by my friend Justin Schwartz with enthusiastic negativity: “It has contempt for its characters, contempt for the movies, contempt for itself, contempt for everything.” I wondered and waited, and, at the Elgin, after a day screwing cheap pens together, fell asleep for a few minutes, and wondered long afterward what all the fuss was about. Of course, I figured it out eventually—because it took me a few years to catch up with the Hollywood studio age for which it is, among other things, a living memorial. (“Godard on Godard,” the book of his criticism and interviews, was my introduction to the idea that there was actually art in Hollywood—which had, until then, seemed to me merely an ambulatory Las Vegas—and my guide to the movies that needed to be seen.)

“Masculine Feminine”: Seen about twenty-five times between 1975 and 1980 (whether in a screening for a class by the Princeton film professor Gilberto Perez or at the Carnegie Hall Cinema or the Thalia or three times in one night when I projected it for the college Film Society), inspired by my identification with its protagonist, a twenty-one-year-old who prefers Bach to rock and feels old for his age, by its views of a gray old Paris that nonetheless throbbed with intellectual energy, by its political acerbity, by its self-deprecating romanticism, and by its simple inventiveness. “Masculine Feminine” was the first of Godard’s films that gave the impression of being the kind of film that a student could make—that even provided a template for young people’s movies. And there was a Grove Press book (which, I later learned, my colleague David Denby had a hand in editing) that included the script and a selection of related texts—most important, excerpts from the great book “En Attendant Godard,” by Michel Vianey, who followed Godard around on and off the set, and brought the world of the movie to life on the page. It’s simply one of the greatest film books ever written; it’s still untranslated into English.

“Comment Ça Va”: 1977, Bleecker Street Cinema: Cahiers du Cinéma dispatched its co-editor Serge Daney to New York with a batch of new French movies, including the trio of films by Godard from 1975-76. (Here’s an interview with Daney that ran in the program booklet, which I still have somewhere.) The event—the precursor to what is now the annual Rendez-Vous with French Cinema—was a revelation. The films (the others were “Numéro Deux” and “Ici et Ailleurs”) seemed, in their way, unfinished; they were vectors pointing toward future work, and this one in particular was imbued with a blend of self-critique and visual rhapsody that offered, we’d all soon find out, the styles and themes that he is still elaborating to this day.

“Made in USA”: This 1966 film was long impossible to see here, supposedly due to legal obstacles to its distribution (the producer hadn’t acquired rights to the novel by Donald Westlake that Godard adapted), but, around 1980, the Mudd Club (the White Street night spot and music venue) got hold of a 16-mm. print and showed it—with the projector in the room—to a crowd of heavy smokers. It was like watching a movie outdoors in London by night, or as if through the shrouding mists of time.

“Hail Mary”: Godard’s 1985 version of the New Testament legend, set in and around a gas station in Switzerland, proved controversial, due in large part to images showing Mary (i.e., the actress Myriem Roussel) in the nude. There were violent protests in France and elsewhere; when the film was premièred at the New York Film Festival that fall, there were busloads of protesters denouncing the film and its screening (though, of course, it’s unlikely that any of them had actually seen it). They were packed so densely around Alice Tully Hall that the police had to cordon off a narrow corridor for ticket-holders to get to the screening. I had no ticket, and was in the habit of going to festival screenings through the benevolent enterprise of scalpers. The protesters and the police presence put them out of business that night, and I didn’t get to see the film until it went into commercial release the following week.

“King Lear”: January 1988, Quad Cinema, three times; each time, among about a dozen other viewers. His greatest film, along with….

“In Praise of Love”: I went to Paris for its release, in May, 2001, the day after its première at the Cannes festival. Several of its scenes were shot in the corridor outside a movie house in Montparnasse, a few hundred feet from the apartment where I was staying. The theatre proudly posted a sign outside proclaiming the privilege of showing a film that had partly been made there. This would, I thought, doubtless be an event. The first screening was at 10 A.M., Wednesday, May 16th; I figured there would be a line, crowds, jostling for tickets and seats, a TV crew or two there to capture the excitement. I got there at 9:30; the corridor was empty, the box office was still closed. Fifteen or twenty people turned up for the first show. I went to screenings throughout Paris for the next week or ten days (the movie was playing in about ten theatres—which may have been a marketing mistake); only one, at the classic St.-Germain-des-Prés art house on Friday night, had anything like a crowd. And the reviews of the film welcomed it with mitigated enthusiasm. Godard had worked for many years on the film; he had carefully refined its themes and ideas, he had leaped ahead with new video techniques and reached back with velvety black-and-white cinematography, he had unfurled a tenderly passionate love story, he had put together a remarkable cast (especially the lead actor, Bruno Putzulu) and conjured their characters with nuance and tenderness. In its originality and personal significance, it was (after “Breathless” and “Every Manfor Himself”) Godard’s third first film. And for this, he met with a great deal of publicity (interviews were all over the journals of Paris) and yet with critical indifference. It had to have been a terrible blow.

Other movies, other places: the Cinema Studio, a few screens in the Latin Quarter, the Museum of Modern Art (and a 16-mm. Steenbeck in its library), a memorable exhibit at the Swiss Institute (which featured piles of folding chairs tangled together supporting TV monitors playing videos by Godard), the erstwhile screening room at the Public Theatre, and, of course, the New Community Cinema in Huntington, Long Island. The ease of watching movies at home on DVD or streaming video, making movies more like the books in our libraries, is a crucial factor in the endurance, even the reinforcement, of the cinematic legacy, but what’s lost is the narrative of the hunt.

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